OK, this isn't really a Mandrake problem, but it _is_ happening on my
Mandrake system...
Some of you may recall that I had some trouble with lilo last week. In
short, my system boots (both Linux and Windoze) from a SCSI hard drive,
but I have an IDE drive attached for storage purposes. The BIOS is set
to boot the SCSI drive first, which it does, and System Commander then
allows me to select whether I want to boot Win98 or Linux. When I try
to run lilo in this configuration, though, it warns me that /dev/sda3 is
not on the first hard disk. When I subsequently try to boot, it gets as
far as "LI" and then gives up.
My workaround for this problem is to detach the IDE drive when I need
to use lilo. Elegant it ain't, but it works.
That was a week ago. This past weekend, I bought a new IDE hard
drive. I figured I could copy all my Linux stuff to that drive, and
then boot from there. I created a primary partition of 350 MB for /,
and placed the other partitions (and a large FAT32 partition) in an
extended partition. I expected that lilo wouldn't complain any more,
since /dev/hda1 is (in its estimation) on the first disk.
I was right--sort of. After changing the references in lilo.conf to
refer to /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/sda3, lilo ran without any errors,
warnings, or other complaints. Then I rebooted the system. System
Commander came up as usual, I selected Linux from the correct drive--and
got the all-too-familiar "LI" again, whereupon the system froze.
I am able to boot my Linux system from /dev/hda1 in two ways now: (1)
use a boot floppy, and (2) alter the BIOS settings to boot A,C,SCSI
(rather than A,SCSI,C) whenever I want to run Linux. Both of these
methods work fine, but either one is a bit of a hack.
An overview of the lilo documentation didn't uncover anything useful to
my problem. I suspect the issue is that lilo believes (incorrectly)
that the IDE drive is the first drive and the SCSI drive is the second
one, irrespective of the boot order, and then it sets itself to look for
the boot information on "the first drive" (or whatever). Is there any
way to tell lilo that /dev/sda really _is_ the first disk (or that
/dev/hda _isn't_)? Or any other way to take care of this? Many thanks
for any help.
--
Dan Brown, KE6MKS, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good
with ketchup.
